The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has moved one step closer to allowing sales of laboratory cultured meat products, announcing it has completed a pre-market consultation with Upside Foods. The company says its lab-grown chicken is safe to eat, and now the FDA has agreed. Upside Foods can now begin the process of getting products certified for sale to consumers, but instead of perusing a slaughterhouse, government regulators will be inspecting a shiny lab filled with vats of cultured chicken cells.
Upside Foods says it was among the first startups to tackle lab-grown meat when it was founded in 2015. It spent the last seven years developing its production technology and accepting funding to keep the lights on, including a huge $400 million Series C round earlier this year. In its statements to the FDA, Upside Foods claimed there is no reason to expect chicken cells cultured in its production facility are any less safe than the cells growing inside chickens. After a year of study, the FDA now believes Upside has enough data to support that claim.
This is an important milestone, but it’s not the same as giving Upside the green light to stuff consumers full of lab-grown animal cells. The company will have to go through the same inspection system as traditional food producers, including granting access to USDA officials who will ensure materials for human consumption meet safety standards. The FDA says it will work with the USDA as these products come to market to develop effective regulations and labeling requirements.
Upside Foods’ lab-grown chicken nuggets.
The issues with large-scale animal farming are pervasive and increasingly problematic as human activity continues to impact the climate. Producing a calorie of energy from meat uses about 100 times as much water as a calorie of grain, and the carbon footprint of animal agriculture cannot be overstated. For example, cows produce more than a quarter of all methane emissions in the US, and methane is 20 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.
Upside Foods claims that its production methods will use 77 percent less water and 62 percent less land than conventional farming. It also relies on 100 percent renewable energy in its production facility. However, cultured meat has never been produced at an industrial scale. So, the environmental benefit remains hypothetical. Upside also promotes the potential to reduce animal cruelty — imagine guiltlessly ordering fried chicken and knowing it was never alive to suffer. That might be a reality in a few years, but no one yet knows how expensive or tasty laboratory meat will be once it hits the market — although Richard Branson, who has invested in Upside Foods, says it’s good.
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